Placement officer

References

Research

"Information Frictions in Education and Inequality"(Job Market Paper) Why does the place where children grow up shape their opportunities in life? This paper explores the role of imperfect information and local information transmission as a novel explanation. First, I uncover a new empirical fact: when earnings of college graduates are low, a higher share of college graduates living in a school-district is associated with lower college enrollment of high-school students graduating from that district. While this pattern is hard to reconcile through models with local spillovers in the production of human capital, I show that it is consistent with a model featuring imperfect information and local learning. The key elements are uncertainty about the skill-premium and learning through signals about the wages earned by nearby high-skill individuals. In this environment, more exposure to highly educated neighbors brings more information about the skill-premium. However, this only translates into more education if the observed wages increase the perceived skill-premium. Using a calibrated version of the model, I find that this novel mechanism explains 2/3 of the college enrollment gap between children from high-skill parents and those from low-skill families. Implementing a disclosure policy that corrects inaccurate perceptions about the skill-premium closes this gap substantially.

Research in Progress

"Mismatch Cycles"(with Isaac Baley) Using a recently developed worker-occupation mismatch measure for the US labor market, we document that mismatch is pro-cyclical. However, there is substantial heterogeneity by previous employment status: mismatch is pro-cyclical for workers in ongoing job relationships and job-to-job transitions, consistent with the cleansing effect of recessions; while mismatch is counter-cyclical for new hires from unemployment, consistent with the sullying effect of recessions. Our empirical findings show that the cleansing effect dominates. We then provide new evidence that conditional on mismatch, business cycle conditions at the start of the match are important in explaining variation in job duration. We explain the observed pattern through a model of learning about workers’ mismatch, in which the learning technology varies over the business cycle.

"Rival Cross-Ownership and Acquisition Decisions" (with Miguel Antón, José Azar and Mireia Giné)Diversified shareholders prefer corporate policies that maximize their portfolio value rather than the value of the individual firm. This may explain the implementation of policies that lower individual firm value. Acquisitions, which are known to have negative returns on average, have been recognized as a puzzling example of value-destroying firm policies. We study the effect of common ownership on acquisition decisions, taking into account both the effect of interests in target firms and in rival firms in shareholder decisions.